which neither public opinion nor private conscience granted to the novelist of 1850; and with the new freedom and the tolerant national public, they are supposed to have become more secular, more sensuous, more erudite, and, above all, more vital and realistic.
To whatever disadvantages New England birth and breeding exposes the artist, Hawthorne was exposed. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804, he had in his veins the blood of Puritans, counted a witch-hanging judge among his ancestors, and was probably the first of his line who did not regard the writing and reading of romances as idleness and vanity. After nearly all his important literary work was done he saw something of England and Italy, but his experience till late in life was provincial, not to say parochial, and he himself avowed that New England was as large a lump of earth as his sympathies could embrace. The society of his native town he found so unremunerative or so formidable that he lived there for twelve years, following his graduation from Bowdoin, in virtual solitude, writing in obscurity and publishing anonymously the stories later collected as Twice Told Tales. In personal relations he ordinarily exhibited a taciturnity and reserve no doubt fostered by his hermit years but alleged to be characteristic of those who live too steadily by the "rockbound coast." In his art he maintained a reticence about many things which are now cried from the housetops. He
